How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit in 2024

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, keeping your website in top shape is more critical than ever. As search engines evolve, so do the rules that govern them. Conducting a technical SEO audit is essential if you want to stay ahead of the game and ensure your website ranks well. But don’t worry—this isn’t as daunting as it sounds.

In this guide, we’ll learn everything about conducting a technical SEO audit in 2024. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just getting started, this guide will walk you through the process step by step, using easy-to-understand language and practical tips.

Understanding the Basics of a Technical SEO Audit

What is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit is like a health check-up for your website. Just as you’d go to the doctor to make sure everything is functioning properly in your body, a technical SEO audit ensures that your website is operating efficiently and effectively for both users and search engines.

It involves examining various aspects of your site—like its structure, speed, and mobile-friendliness—to identify any issues that could be hurting your rankings.

Why You Need a Technical SEO Audit in 2024

Search engines like Google are constantly updating their algorithms. What worked well last year might not be as effective today. That’s why it’s crucial to keep up with the latest trends and ensure your site meets current SEO standards.

A technical SEO audit helps you find and fix any issues that could be preventing your site from reaching its full potential. Plus, with the growing importance of user experience, a well-maintained website not only ranks better but also keeps visitors happy.

How Often Should You Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?

You might be wondering how often you need to go through this process. The answer depends on the nature of your website. For larger sites, especially e-commerce platforms, a quarterly audit is recommended. Smaller sites or blogs might only need a full audit once or twice a year.

However, it’s always a good idea to run a mini-audit anytime you notice a drop in rankings or traffic.

Preparing for Your Technical SEO Audit

Setting Clear Goals and Objectives

Before diving into the audit, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Are you looking to improve site speed? Fix crawl errors? Optimize for mobile users? Setting specific goals will help you focus your efforts and measure your success afterward.

Gathering the Right Tools

You wouldn’t start a DIY project without the right tools, and the same goes for a technical SEO audit. Here are some essential tools you’ll need:

Google Search Console: Great for identifying crawl errors, indexing issues, and overall site performance.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Perfect for crawling your website and getting a detailed overview of its structure.
SEMrush or Ahrefs: Useful for tracking your site’s SEO health and analyzing competitive metrics.
Google PageSpeed Insights: This helps you measure and improve your website’s loading speed.
Google Analytics: Provides insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and more.

Benchmarking Your Current SEO Performance

Before making changes, it’s crucial to understand where your site currently stands. Use your tools to gather baseline data on key metrics like organic traffic, bounce rate, page load times, and indexed pages. This will give you a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t, and it will also help you measure the impact of your audit.

Crawling and Indexing

Checking for Crawl Errors

Crawl errors are like roadblocks that prevent search engines from accessing your site’s content. If search engines can’t crawl your site properly, they won’t be able to index your pages, which means they won’t show up in search results. To check for crawl errors, log in to Google Search Console and navigate to the Coverage report.

Here, you’ll see a list of any issues that Google encountered while trying to crawl your site, along with suggestions for fixing them. Common issues include 404 errors (page not found) and server errors.

Assessing Indexability

Once you’ve ensured that search engines can crawl your site, the next step is to make sure that they’re indexing the right pages. Not every page on your site needs to be indexed—like admin pages or duplicate content—but you want to ensure that all your important content is being picked up. In Google Search Console, you can use the URL Inspection tool to check whether specific pages are indexed. If not, it might be due to a “no index” tag or the page might be blocked by your robots.txt file.

Reviewing Robots.txt and Sitemap

Your robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your site they’re allowed to crawl and index. It’s important to review this file to make sure it’s not blocking any important pages. You can easily access your robots.txt file by typing “/robots.txt” at the end of your domain name in the browser.

Similarly, your sitemap is a file that lists all the pages you want search engines to index. Make sure your sitemap is up to date and submitted to Google Search Console.

Analyzing Site Structure and Navigation

Ensuring a Logical Site Architecture

A well-organized site structure is crucial for both users and search engines. Think of your website as a pyramid: at the top, you have your homepage, followed by category pages, subcategories, and individual content pages. Each level should be clearly linked to the next, creating a logical flow that’s easy to navigate.

To audit your site structure, use a tool like Screaming Frog to generate a visual map of your site’s architecture. Look for any pages that are too deep within the structure (more than three clicks away from the homepage) or any pages that are isolated without links from other content.

Optimizing Internal Linking

Internal links are links from one page on your site to another. They help search engines understand the relationship between different pages and distribute link equity (the value passed from one page to another through links) across your site.

During your audit, check for pages with few or no internal links, and make sure your most important pages are linked frequently. Also, ensure that your anchor text (the clickable text in a hyperlink) is descriptive and relevant to the content it’s linking to.

Checking for Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are pages on your site that aren’t linked to any other pages. Because search engines discover pages through links, orphan pages are often overlooked and not indexed. To find orphan pages, use a tool like Screaming Frog or Google Analytics. Once identified, you can either link to these pages from relevant content or decide if they’re necessary to keep.

Mobile-Friendliness and Page Speed Optimization

The Importance of Mobile Optimization in 2024

Mobile optimization isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a necessity. With Google’s mobile-first indexing, the search engine primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing.

This means that if your site doesn’t perform well on mobile devices, your rankings could take a hit, regardless of how great it looks on a desktop. In 2024, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is crucial to maintaining and improving your SEO rankings.

How to Perform a Mobile Usability Test

To check how mobile-friendly your site is, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Simply enter your website’s URL, and the tool will analyze how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. It checks factors like text size, how content fits on the screen, and the spacing of clickable elements.

If any issues are detected, Google will provide suggestions for fixing them. Another tool you can use is Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report, which gives you a comprehensive view of mobile-related issues across your site.

Page Speed Audit: Tools and Techniques

Page speed is a critical factor not only for user experience but also for SEO. A slow-loading website can frustrate visitors, leading to higher bounce rates, which in turn can negatively impact your rankings. To audit your site’s speed, use Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool provides a detailed breakdown of your site’s performance on both mobile and desktop, highlighting areas that need improvement, such as image optimization, server response time, and JavaScript issues.

Another useful tool is GTmetrix, which gives you insights into your site’s load time and suggests ways to make it faster. When working on improving page speed, focus on compressing images, enabling browser caching, and minimizing CSS and JavaScript files.

Analyzing On-Page SEO Factors

Checking Meta Tags and Headers

Meta tags and headers are essential elements that help search engines understand the content of your pages. During your audit, review the meta titles and descriptions for each page to ensure they are unique, descriptive, and within the recommended character limits (around 60 characters for titles and 160 characters for descriptions). These tags should include relevant keywords and accurately reflect the content of the page.

Next, check your headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.). Your H1 tag should be the main title of the page and include the primary keyword. Subheadings (H2, H3, etc.) should be used to structure the content, making it easier for readers and search engines to navigate. Ensure that each page has only one H1 tag and that headers are used logically to break up content.

Ensuring Proper Use of Structured Data and Schema Markup

Structured data, also known as schema markup, is code that helps search engines better understand the content on your site. Implementing structured data can improve how your pages appear in search results, often leading to rich snippets—enhanced listings that include additional information like reviews, ratings, or event details.

To check if your site is using structured data correctly, use Google’s Rich Results Test. This tool will analyze your pages and highlight any issues with your schema markup. Common types of structured data include articles, products, recipes, and events. If you haven’t implemented structured data yet, consider doing so, especially for pages where rich snippets can provide added value.

Analyzing Content Quality and Duplication

Quality content is at the heart of any successful SEO strategy. During your audit, assess the quality of your content across all pages. Look for thin content (pages with little to no valuable information), outdated information, and irrelevant topics. Ensure that your content is engaging, informative, and answers the questions your target audience is likely searching for.

Additionally, check for duplicate content—identical or very similar content across multiple pages—which can confuse search engines and lead to lower rankings. Use tools like Copyscape or Siteliner to identify duplicate content on your site. If you find duplicates, consider consolidating the content into a single, comprehensive page or using canonical tags to indicate the preferred version to search engines.

Technical SEO for Multimedia Content

Optimizing Images for SEO

Images play a significant role in enhancing user experience, but they can also slow down your site if not optimized correctly. During your audit, make sure that all images are compressed to reduce file size without compromising quality. Tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim can help with this.

Next, check that all images have descriptive, keyword-rich alt text. Alt text not only helps with SEO but also makes your site more accessible to visually impaired users. Additionally, ensure that image file names are descriptive and use hyphens to separate words (e.g., “technical-seo-audit-2024.jpg”).

Auditing Video Content

Video content is becoming increasingly important for SEO, but it requires careful optimization to ensure it’s fully indexed and accessible. First, make sure all videos are hosted on a fast and reliable platform, like YouTube or Vimeo, and that they’re embedded on your site with proper schema markup.

Provide transcripts for all videos, as this not only improves accessibility but also gives search engines more context about the video’s content. Use structured data to help search engines understand your videos better, which can lead to your videos appearing in video search results or rich snippets.

Ensuring Proper Multimedia Indexation

Finally, ensure that all your multimedia content—images, videos, infographics, etc.—is being indexed correctly by search engines. You can do this by checking your XML sitemap to make sure all multimedia content is included. If you’re using structured data, double-check that it’s implemented correctly and that Google can read it.

Security and HTTPS

Importance of HTTPS for SEO

In 2024, HTTPS is a non-negotiable factor for any website. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) ensures that the data exchanged between the user’s browser and your website is encrypted, providing a secure browsing experience. Google considers HTTPS a ranking factor, meaning sites with HTTPS have a better chance of ranking higher than those without it.

If your site is still using HTTP, it’s time to make the switch. Most hosting providers offer free SSL certificates, which you can easily install to enable HTTPS on your site. After making the switch, ensure that all pages are properly redirected from HTTP to HTTPS.

Checking SSL Certificate Validity

Your SSL certificate is what enables HTTPS on your site. During your audit, check that your SSL certificate is valid and hasn’t expired. You can do this by clicking on the padlock icon in your browser’s address bar. An expired SSL certificate can lead to security warnings for users and negatively impact your rankings.

Fixing Mixed Content Issues

Mixed content occurs when a page is loaded over HTTPS, but some resources (like images, scripts, or stylesheets) are still being served over HTTP. This can lead to security warnings in the user’s browser and undermine the benefits of HTTPS. To fix mixed content issues, update all URLs for these resources to use HTTPS. You can use a tool like Why No Padlock to identify mixed content on your site.

Technical SEO Audit for International Sites

Hreflang Tags and International SEO

If your site targets multiple languages or regions, hreflang tags are essential. Hreflang tags tell search engines which language or regional version of a page to display to users based on their location or language preference. During your audit, check that hreflang tags are correctly implemented and point to the right pages.

You can use tools like Aleyda Solis’ Hreflang Tag Generator or the Hreflang Tag Testing Tool to verify that your tags are set up correctly. Misconfigured hreflang tags can lead to duplicate content issues or the wrong pages being shown in search results.

Checking for Duplicate Content Across Different Languages

When managing a multilingual site, it’s crucial to ensure that content in different languages isn’t considered duplicate content by search engines. While hreflang tags help prevent this, it’s also important to create unique, high-quality content for each language version of your site.

During your audit, use tools like Copyscape or Siteliner to check for any duplicate content across different language versions of your site. If you find duplicates, consider revising the content or using canonical tags to indicate the preferred version.

Optimizing URL Structures for International Sites

Finally, review your URL structures for international versions of your site. A clear, consistent URL structure makes it easier for search engines to understand your site’s hierarchy and for users to navigate between different language or regional versions.

For example, you can use subdirectories (e.g., “example.com/en/” for English) or subdomains (e.g., “en.example.com”) to separate different language versions. Make sure that your URL structures are logical, and avoid mixing languages within the same URL.

Reporting and Actionable Insights

Compiling Your Audit Findings

Once you’ve completed your audit, it’s time to compile your findings into a clear, actionable report. This report should include all the issues you’ve identified, along with recommendations for fixing them. Organize the report by priority, starting with the most critical issues that need immediate attention.

Prioritizing Issues and Creating an Action Plan

Not all issues will have the same impact on your site’s performance, so it’s important to prioritize them. For example, fixing crawl errors and mobile usability issues should be high on your list, while smaller tweaks, like adjusting meta tags, might be a lower priority. Create a detailed action plan that outlines what needs to be done, who will do it, and the timeline for completion.

Setting Up Monitoring for Ongoing SEO Health

Finally, set up monitoring systems to keep track of your site’s SEO health moving forward. This could include regular checks in Google Search Console, setting up alerts for any major issues, and scheduling mini-audits to catch problems before they escalate. By staying proactive, you can ensure that your site remains in top shape and continues to perform well in search rankings.

Conclusion

Conducting a technical SEO audit might seem like a daunting task, but it’s essential for maintaining a healthy, high-performing website. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you’ll be able to identify and fix any issues that could be holding your site back. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, and regular audits are key to staying ahead of the competition. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into the audit, and watch your site’s performance improve!

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